


i want you between me and the feeling i get when i miss you

by serenitysea



Series: both of you fell the same day & you don't know why (one of you never woke up) [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, these feels are nothing we were ever trained for, with a semi happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenitysea/pseuds/serenitysea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>skyeward + exes meeting again after not speaking for years au</i> prompt</p><p>aka: that time skye and grant broke up because of REASONS and <s>finally</s> get their act together. (sort of.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i want you between me and the feeling i get when i miss you

**Author's Note:**

> \+ i tried not to make it TERRIBLE.  
> \+ if you don't read the first part, you will be missing A LOT.

_so throw me a rope_  
 _to hold me in place_  
 _show me a clock_  
 _for counting my days down_  
  
 _cause everything’s easier_  
 _when you’re beside me_  
 _come back and find me_  
 _cause i feel alone_  
  
*  
  
She never tells him that she loves him.  
  
*  
  
"Skye," Grant looks at her strangely while she finishes her homework at the table, waiting for her to look at him. "What are you eating?"  
  
"Duh. m &m’s."  
  
He blinks. “You _hate_ m &m’s.”  
  
  
(She doesn’t say; _I know_.)  
  
(She doesn’t say; _How do_ you _know that?_ )  
  
(She doesn’t say; _the chocolate masks the guilt._ )  
  
  
She says: “You really think I’d be eating them if that were the case?”  
  
*  
  
It has been almost seven years since they have last seen each other.  
  
*  
  
It’s late and she’s been trying to sort out college applications for the past three and a half hours. Mrs. Ward has made her famous oatmeal raisin cookies and a tall glass of milk to keep her energy up and Skye doesn’t have the heart to go home before she completes the final batch of applications. It seems like that would be bailing.  
  
But when it’s nearing one in the morning and Grant is trying to get her to the guest bedroom so she can rest, it is Mrs. Ward who intercepts Skye and guides her into Rosie’s bedroom. “You’ll stay in here, of course.” Skye opens her mouth to protest, and Mrs. Ward continues, “It’s what Rosie would have wanted.”  
  
(It doesn’t matter that it makes her want to throw up. Doesn’t matter that she has so much _guilt_ from the whole experience; that she _survived_ , that it was her _careless_ remark that practically set Rosie’s death into motion; that she can’t ever forget that night.)  
  
(Rosie would have wanted her to do many things but Skye is pretty sure she wouldn’t have wanted her to live like this.)  
  
"Thank you," Skye replies politely, kissing Mrs. Ward on the cheek and studiously avoiding Grant’s eyes. "It’ll be just like old times."  
  
Mrs. Ward smiles for the first time in weeks and Skye tucks it away safely, filing it under _appropriate responses_.   
  
That night Skye sleeps on the floor in the closet.  
  
She can’t sleep in her ~~dead~~ best friend’s bed.  
  
(How does she tell them that sharing a bed with a ghost is redundant because she already does with the nightmares starring their daughter; the kind that leave her shaking and broken when she surfaces from it.)  
  
*  
  
In the end, they have a knock-down no holds barred fight in her bedroom.  
  
Because it was after all, tradition.  
  
He collects her from the bar and drives her home with his jaw clenched so tightly that he will probably need to get the sealant on his molars replaced and she stares out the window like she’s riding to her execution.  
  
(Some things never change.)  
  
*  
  
Mr. and Mrs. Ward sometimes drop hints.  
  
Mr. Ward usually is pretty reticent unless he’s been drinking — and Skye knows the signs well enough by now to steer clear of him if she’s feeling a little _too_ close to the edge — and Mrs. Ward just stares at her with a naked hunger of wanting to _ask_ so many questions and the grooming to know what she can’t get away with in comfortable conversation.  
  
Skye feels like she’s traded the microscope from school in for a microscope at their house.  
  
(She just sometimes wants to only see Grant and stay with him in his bedroom and pretend like the outside world doesn’t exist.)  
  
*  
  
Her parents are asleep and he’s let them into the house and it’s like deja vu all over again. She can’t believe he still knows the security code and still manages to avoid every creaking floorboard on the way to her room like it hasn’t been _years_ since he last set foot in her house.  
  
"What an original idea. Are you gonna break up with me again, too?"  
  
(She doesn’t care that it’s mean and it’s low and it’s all the things she swore she’d never sink to again.)  
  
The look of anger and frustration (the one she could not identify all those years ago) however — that isn’t new at all.  
  
"You were _erasing_ yourself, Skye. In what universe is _that_ healthy?”  
  
"In the one that kept your parents _alive_ , you idiot. Didn’t you see it was killing them?”  
  
He drops his head in frustration. “Didn’t you see it was killing _you_?”  
  
*  
  
Just before the first anniversary of Rosie’s death, Skye marches over to the Ward house and plops herself at the kitchen table.  
  
Grant comes downstairs first but doesn’t have the opportunity to do more than raise his eyebrows questioningly before he is followed by Tommy and their parents.  
  
With breakfast preparations well under way, Skye suddenly announces: “We had a math test she didn’t want to study for.”  
  
Everything stops.  
  
The cereal falls out of Tommy’s hands, and cheerios scatter all over the counter. Mrs. Ward drops her tea, splattering hot liquid everywhere.  
  
When they keep staring at her, Skye bravely continues. “She hated the girls in our gym class. When the school lunch was meatloaf she’d buy two apple pies instead. Gym class always futzed with her hair. She never liked prank day.”  
  
Each revelation is like someone scoring deeply into her chest.  
  
(She can’t help but feel like she somehow owes them this. That her debt for _living_ can somehow be paid off by telling them about Rosie.)  
  
(It doesn’t matter if she bleeds out in the process.)  
  
*  
  
Skye looks like he’s slapped her. “She was my _best friend_.”  
  
"I know." Grant is careful to gentle the hands he’s got bracketing her arms. "I just didn’t want to lose you."  
  
"So you decided the answer was _pushing me away_ ,” she wrenches out of his grip, glaring up at him. “You told me I didn’t know what I was feeling, that it couldn’t be forever for us. That I was too _young_.”  
  
*  
  
She doesn’t tell him that she loves him.  
  
*  
  
"You don’t know what you’re saying," Grant says tiredly, rubbing at his temple. "You’ve got your whole life ahead of you and I don’t want to be the one holding you back."  
  
"You’re not holding me back!" She can’t help the tears that are falling. She wishes she were anywhere but here. "It’s not holding someone back if you care about them more than anyone else in the world. It’s not holding someone back if you —"  
  
"If you _what_ , Skye?” His eyes are tracking her intently.  
  
She’s never actually _said_ the words.  
  
*  
  
When Skye comes home on an ill-advised visit to see her parents (they’d insisted she stay and work but their health has been poor for the past few weeks and she can’t bear to lose anyone else), Mrs. Ward calmly lets it drop that Grant has relocated to the West Coast.  
  
She says _West Coast_ , like it is a place of its own.  
  
Like it doesn’t mean _as far as humanly possible away from **you**_.  
  
That night Skye grabs a bottle of champagne and rides her bike to the cemetery. She lays out her favorite beach towel (the one they’d gotten hair dye on after a badly-executed home-highlights kit) next to Rosie’s grave and stares up at the stars. She cracks open the champagne and sips straight from the bottle and pretends like it isn’t the worst year of her life.  
  
(That happened when she was seventeen, remember?)  
  
(It just feels like she never grew past it.)  
  
*  
  
"I _can’t tell you_ ,” she bends at the waist to try and catch her breath, but it doesn’t help. _Nothing_ will ever help. “If I do, that makes it real.”  
  
And Grant — god bless him — knows she isn’t talking about her feelings for him being real.  
  
She’s talking about Rosie’s last words.  
  
(She’s talking about the denial that has been keeping a protective vigil in her head for the past two years, the one that won’t fade out no matter what.)  
  
She can’t tell him because it can’t become _real_.  
  
  
(Her best friend is —)  
  
(— She’s _not_.)  
  
*  
  
  
She thinks she sees him once, a hotel lobby in Manhattan.  
  
The breadth of his shoulders is the same but there is a weariness she has never seen before.  
  
It can’t be him.  
  
The Grant she knows (the one she _lov_ —) would never let the world get him down like that. He was going to change the world; make it heel under his command. He was going to make sure that no one ever got hurt again.  
  
(She knows because she vowed to not stand in his way.)  
  
Someone calls her name and she turns around and when she looks back only seconds later, he is gone.  
  
*  
  
When they break up, a horrible chasm opens up between the two families.  
  
*  
  
(He sees her, once.  
  
She’s got on a black dress that makes her look entirely too grown up.  
  
There are men looking at her the same way they did when she waltzed her way into the bar at home all those years ago; feminine swagger and badly faked confidence and he doesn’t have the right to sweep her out of there. Not this time.  
  
There is a good looking young man calling her name, and she lights up and smiles at him broadly. When she throws her arms around him in a hug, Grant feels his stomach bottom out.  
  
He books a flight to California the next day.)  
  
*  
  
When Skye is in her senior year of high school, Grant declares his major. He’s going into Law.  
  
"I don’t want anyone to suffer like we did."   
  
And Skye gets it; he has this fire inside to destroy every drunk driver in the world, so that no one will live through their nightmare, not when he is on the hunt.  
  
(Skye doesn’t tell him that people suffer like them every single day. She doesn’t have the heart to take that away from him. If he thinks he can change the world, she isn’t going to stand in his way.)  
  
*  
  
Tommy hates being in the middle.  
  
She knows this because he says: “I hate being stuck in the middle.”  
  
Skye peels at the label on her beer and keeps her head ducked forward so that she doesn’t have to look into his eyes.  
  
( _Rosie’s_ eyes.)  
  
"It’s not like I’m asking you about him," she finally says, signaling the bartender for another beer.  
  
Tommy snorts, tossing a few pretzels into his mouth. “It’s not like you’re _not_ , either.”  
  
*  
  
"This isn’t going to work," Grant says with the kind of finality that will one day win him ninety-seven percent of all cases he fields in the courtroom.  
  
"I agree," Skye rolls onto her back, half smiling at him lazily. She stretches out her arms and makes grabby motions with her hands. "You should definitely be distracting me from this circle of hell otherwise known as housing applications."  
  
(Rosie always said they had to live to on campus for the _full college experience_.)  
  
(Skye is trying to follow her every instruction _to the letter_.)  
  
(Except for the _last_ one.)  
  
*  
  
"I’m sorry this happened," Mrs. Ward says carefully, tucking an errant piece of hair behind Skye’s ear. It’s a motherly gesture, one she has performed more times than Skye can count.  
  
(She says _i’m sorry this happened_ but it sounds an awful lot like _now you’ve taken two of my children away from me_.)  
  
*  
  
"I think we should take a break."  
  
(It is the screeching roar of the car crash all over again.)  
  
(It is the look in Rosie’s eyes just before impact.)  
  
(It is _of course he’s my favorite brother._ )  
  
It’s _killing_ her.  
  
*  
  
He exhales steadily and stuffs his hands in his pockets. When he glances up at her, she has a hard time reconciling this new, adult version of him to the boy she would have given _everything_ to. But then he smiles in the lopsided way he always had and it’s like coming home.  
  
"Can we try this again?" Grant pleads, holding up his hands in surrender. "Where we don’t take each other’s heads off?"  
  
There is a fire still burning in her veins and all the hurt from having survived this many years without him and she kind of hates that he really thinks it is going to be this easy — but then she thinks of what Rosie would say and it just.  
  
It seems stupid not to pretend like she isn’t glad to see him. Like her heart didn’t beat triple time when he strolled into the bar. Like she isn’t still stupidly hung up on him, after all these years.  
  
"Okay," She says quietly, sitting on the edge of her bed.  
  
*  
  
She doesn’t tell him that she loves him.  
  
*  
  
They talk until the sun comes up the next morning.  
  
She’s somehow curled into his side and he has an arm draped across her, anchoring them together and she has half a thought to worry what her parents will think when they find out that she’s home again (and that Grant is in her bed) when he leaps into action, scrambling off the bed.  
  
"Uh." She pinches the bridge of her nose. "What is happening right now?"  
  
He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a box.  
  
Her eyes go wide. “Have you _LOST YOUR FREAKING MIND_?”  
  
There is a mischievous grin on his face that she is going to wipe off in a matter of seconds as soon as she gets her wit about her and — he’s talking.  
  
"— I can’t lose you again," He says, dropping to his knees in front of her.  
  
Like it’s that easy. Like he’s going to throw in her face a conversation they had ten years ago and that’s going to magically undo the mess they were in.  
  
"This is so ridiculous. All we do is _fight_ — when we’re even on the same coast at the same time — and in case you’ve forgotten, we _broke up years ago_.”  
  
He isn’t backing down and she’s seen that look on his face and it _never_ bodes well for the opposition.  
  
"I know why you can’t tell me you love me. You know why I had to let you go. There are no secrets between us." Grant sets the ring box down on the blankets and sits so that his shoulder, arm and legs are pressed tightly into hers; a constant, visceral reminder that he is _here_ and so is she and there is no use hiding anything at all. “Aren’t you tired of this?”  
  
She is.  
  
She’s _so_ tired.  
  
"I miss her," Skye stares down at her hands, wondering if the phantom ache in her chest will ever go away.  
  
"I know."  
  
"I don’t know how to make that stop."  
  
(The men she’d dated always wondered why she held back; why there was a part of her that she was unwilling to surrender and had one foot out the door at all times.)  
  
"Skye," Grant sighs and reaches for her hand to lace their fingers together. "I don’t think it ever really does."  
  
And he gets it, because _of_ _course_ he gets it. Because he’d _always_ gotten it.  
  
( _Yes_. Yes, she will marry him.)  
  
The heady relief of _being_ and the merciful weight of _understanding_ threatens to drown her in this moment and she can barely see him past the warring sensations of bittersweet regret ( _why had they wasted so much time?_ ) and _don’t blink or you’ll miss it_ happiness (it’s such a foreign feeling she almost can’t identify it) that she practically chokes on it.  
  
He shouldn’t be able to do this after all these years. He shouldn’t _know_ her this well.  
  
(He is _definitely_ her favorite.)  
  
"Dammit _she was right_ ,” Skye mutters in frustration, ignoring the confused look he gives her.  
  
She reaches around him and slaps the box into his free hand. “Ask me for real this time.”  
  
*  
  
( _epilogue_.)  
  
  
When they get married, there is a picture of Rosie on an easel where tradition dictates the Maid of Honor should stand.  
  
They are led through their vows and Skye dutifully repeats every word.  
  
(Except for the part where she promises to love him.)  
  
(She doesn’t say that.)  
  
If people think anything weird about it, they don’t listen. Skye has nothing but love for her new in-laws (even if she is privately relieved to never have to eat m &m’s again) and a special fondness for her little brother. Her parents don’t smile at the wedding — but then, they know all too well what it took to get there.  
  
*  
  
She is standing at the railing outside her wedding reception and watching the stars bloom into the night when a breeze caresses her cheek.  
  
"I miss you, Ro." She whispers, and her words are scattered into the wind. "I miss you every day."  
  
*  
  
He finds her (because of course he _always_ finds her) with a suspicious wetness on her cheeks and feels his heart clench tightly in answer. She doesn’t have to tell him what she is thinking about. Skye has always had the same look on her face when Rosie is on her mind; the raw heartbreak commingled with bittersweet nostalgia.  
  
"Hey."  
  
At his voice, she turns and doesn’t bother hiding her expression or wiping away her tears. He knows her too well for that.    
  
Grant pulls her close, kissing her deeply until the sadness has mostly vanished from her eyes. “I love you.”  
  
*  
  
She never tells him she loves him.  
  
She _shows_ him.

*

**Author's Note:**

> \+ [tumblr](http://b-isforbombshell.tumblr.com)  
> \+ lyrics & title belong to _throw me a rope_ by kt tunstall


End file.
